A Special Edition of East European Jewish Affairs

Guest Editors for this issue of East European Jewish Affairs:

Dr. Semion Goldin, Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Dr. Scott Ury, Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism and Dept. of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University

Although long considered a central part of modern Jewish history and society, the study of Jewish migration remains a relatively under-researched part of the modern Jewish experience. Hence, despite recent research on the topic by leading scholars, the number of studies dedicated to Jewish migration pales in comparison to those that examine other central topics like Hasidism, antisemitism, American Jewry, the Holocaust, the State of Israel and more.

Recent developments in fields like trans-national studies, cultural history and the quantitative analysis of social history all offer students, researchers and scholars new tools for studying and understanding the place of migration in modern Jewish history and society. In addition to these methodological developments, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the accompanying end of the Cold War, the parallel transformation of Israeli society, and the rise of Jewish Studies in North America over the past generation provide scholars with the opportunity to reflect upon some of the larger, underlying themes that shape modern Jewish society, like migration.

With these and other questions in mind, we are currently soliciting proposals for a special volume of the peer-reviewed journal East European Jewish Affairs dedicated to the topic of: “Jewish Migration with, from, and to Eastern Europe, 1800-2017.”

As part of our efforts to shed new light on long-standing questions, we are interested in proposals that question or challenge conventional chronologies of Jewish migration history, papers that consciously integrate new methodological tools including those developed in the realm of cultural studies and the study of gender, and pieces that compare Jewish migration to other types of migration.

Alongside new methodological approaches, scholars and students are encouraged to revisit long-standing questions in the field including the role of anti-Jewish violence as a factor in promoting Jewish migration, the various images and receptions of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe in different societies, and the impact of geo-political developments such as war, bureaucratic policies and natural disasters on the pace of Jewish migration. We are also interested in proposals that re-consider the very direction of Jewish migration in the modern era (oftentimes understood as a process that flowed from East to West) and also the scope of internal Jewish migration within specific countries or empires.

The implementation of new methodologies and the focus on key questions will also contribute to our efforts to examine the longstanding place of migration in larger, oftentimes redemptive narratives of modern Jewish history and society constructed in Israel and in the Americas. On these and related points, we are interested in contributions that examine the construction, representation and memory of Jewish migration including those that focus on the place of Jewish migration in some of the more public aspects of Jewish life such as Jewish (or Israeli) museums, documentary and feature films, and other realms of popular culture. Another potential topic of inquiry is patterns or waves of migration that have been overlooked, under-studied or even forgotten.

Researchers and scholars interested in contributing an article to this proposed volume of East European Jewish Affairs should submit a 300 word abstract to eeja@colorado.edu by no later than August 15, 2016. Editors will inform those who submit abstracts of decisions by August 31, 2016. All submissions will be subject to East European Jewish Affairs’ standard, double-blind, peer-review process.